The cost of much heavy duty equipment as, for example, off the road vehicles or construction equipment, is such that it must be kept in use relatively constantly in order to amortize the cost at a profitable rate. In addition, many construction contracts include incentive clauses and/or penalties to respectively encourage the contractor to complete the project ahead of schedule or maintain the project on schedule. Both of these factors strongly suggest that such equipment be designed so that down time due to vehicle malfunction is absolutely minimized.
Since vehicles and construction equipment of this sort absolutely cannot operate properly unless their engines are adequately cooled, all precautions are taken to ensure that the cooling systems for such engines are long lived and easy to maintain. As a result of this particular concern, the so-called modular radiator has evolved.
In modular radiators, relatively small cores, that is, fin and tube structures, are lined up in side-by-side relationship as individual modules extending between headers. If a leak is encountered in one of the modules as a result of operation of the vehicle or other factors, it is much less time-consuming to change the leaky module than to replace the entire radiator. As a consequence, considerable down time is avoided and the vehicle may be restored to service much more rapidly.
Modular radiators are not, however, without disadvantages of their own. For one thing, they are considerably more costly to initially assemble. For another, many such modular radiators occupy more space on the vehicle than is desired because the frames of the modular radiators have to be designed so as to allow relative movement of the modules with respect to each other so that one may be removed or installed without touching the others.
More recently, a modular radiator having heat exchange modules including finned tubes extending between spaced tanks has been proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,741,392, issued May 3, 1988 to James Morse. While the Morse construction has avoided a number of the problems heretofore evidenced in the use of modular radiators, its requirement of two tanks for each module coupled with two manifolds is a cost disadvantage.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the above problems.